Researchers: Remains may be from 17th century

By Michael OppermannCorrespondent

Monday

Feb 16, 2009 at 12:01 AM

The dig, which is being led by a student studying archaeology at the University of Florida, could yield important clues about the role of Spanish missions in colonizing Florida and missionaries' influence on Native American culture.

OCALA - An archaeological dig along the Ocklawaha River has uncovered what researchers believe are remains from the 17th-century Spanish mission known as Santa Lucia de Acuera.The dig, which is being led by a student studying archaeology at the University of Florida, could yield important clues about the role of Spanish missions in colonizing Florida and missionaries' influence on Native American culture."It is very important anthropologically and archaeologically, and it is very exciting to have been searching for so long and to finally locate this site and identify it," said Willet Boyer III, who is pursuing a doctorate from UF and heads the project. "This is a site that may have been settled by the time the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It is probably the oldest confirmed historical site in Marion County."Boyer credits John Worth, author of two books on Spanish Florida's colonial system and a professor from the University of West Florida's Department of Anthropology, with laying the groundwork for the discovery.While working on his own dissertation in the early 1990s, Worth traveled to Seville, Spain, to study many of the original records of the Spanish colonial empire.A number of the documents had been destroyed in colonial-era conflicts or had been improperly inventoried in more recent times. But Worth gathered enough information about missions in Spanish territory to deduce their general locations.Among the sites that Worth studied were two Franciscan missions founded near the source of the Ocklawaha River around the 1620s and named San Luis de Eloquale and Santa Lucia de Acuera.Worth stopped finding references to the missions after the late 1650s and suspects they were abandoned around the time of the Timucuan Rebellion of 1656.Boyer's doctoral research picked up where Worth left off, and he began searching in earnest for the lost missions."I've been looking for this particular site for most of the time that I've been studying anthropology," Boyer said.

His first break came when a local homeowner approached him after a lecture about the Timucuan chiefdoms. The man claimed he'd found beads and shards of pottery on his property.With the landowner's permission, Boyer divided the land into a grid and took soil samples at regular intervals. He discovered fragments of native pottery dispersed across the field and Spanish pottery concentrated at two locations.The wide dispersal of artifacts suggests that this was the site of the Santa Lucia de Acuera mission, because the mission was located in the Acuera chiefdom's principal town, which had an estimated population between several hundred and more than a thousand.Spanish artifacts unearthed at the site include fragments of iron nails, several types of beads and shards of pottery.Most beads were of the cobalt blue seed, blue sand-tumbled drawn and white opaque tumbled varieties available throughout the colonial period.Others were of earlier Nueva Cadiz and seven-layer faceted chevron types and provide evidence that this is the same Acuera village that the Hernando de Soto expedition visited in 1539.The fact that the two mission sites are roughly 5.5 miles apart also matches historical records.Despite the abundance of circumstantial evidence indirectly linking the site of the dig to the Santa Lucia de Acuera mission, it was not until last month that the dig unearthed evidence which moved the identity of the site from a strong possibility to a near certainty.It was then that Boyer found signs of a structure built in the style of a Spanish mission over a section of earth that featured an especially high concentration of Spanish artifacts."The Timucuan typically built round or ovoid houses," he noted. "This structure is apparently rectangular in shape and the posts that we found in the ground are built with logs that appear to have been squared or shaped, which is very typical of missions."

A typical Spanish mission would have included a church, kitchen and friary for the single Franciscan missionary living in the village.Further excavation will be needed before Boyer can determine which building has been found.The mission was a critical component of Spain's colonization efforts, which sought to convert Native Americans to Catholicism and incorporate them into colonial society.The system worked so well that even after the Timucuan Rebellion, captured leaders proclaimed that they had never abandoned their loyalty to the Spanish king or the Catholic church, citing an edict of the Spanish governor as the cause of their revolt.Despite the success of the mission system, records dating from 1678 to 1680 indicate that the Acuera were still living in towns within their traditional territory and engaging in native religious practices long after the otherTimucuan chiefdoms had been uprooted and Catholicized."These people resisted the effects of colonization in a way that nearly all of the other (chiefdoms) that were missionized by the Spanish did not," Boyer said."Part of my research is aimed at trying to find out what factors may have made these people so different from the rest of the missionized Timucuan chiefdoms."

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.